Thursday, February 16, 2012

Mother Jones: "California High Speed Rail Now Even More Ridiculous Than Before"

Mother Jones is seeing the flaws in the argument?
God I love intellectual honesty.
From MJ:

As regular readers know, I've been skeptical of California's LA-SF
bullet train from the beginning, and my skepticism has only grown as
cost estimates have doubled to nearly $100 billion in only a few years.
But unrealistic cost projections have never been the only reason to be dubious. There were also unrealistic ridership projections, along
with unrealistic estimates of what the alternatives to high-speed rail
would cost.

Until today, though, I didn't know just how unrealistic some of those
estimates were. Rail supporters say that even if the LA-SF train costs
$100 billion, it's still a bargain compared to the $171 billion it would
cost to expand road and air infrastructure to handle the increased
traffic between LA and San Francisco that we're going to get regardless.
But check this out:

The rail authority has relied heavily on New York-based Parsons
Brinkerhoff, a contractor that helped fund the political campaign for
the $9.9-billion bond measure passed by voters in 2008....In October,
Parsons submitted the analysis that came up with the $171 billion, a
number that initially appeared in the authority's draft business plan
released Nov. 1. In the study, Parsons first estimated how much
passenger capacity the system would have at completion in 2033 and then
calculated the cost for providing the same airport and highway capacity.

Parsons said the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.

This is just jaw-droppingly shameless. There's not even a pretense
here of providing a reasonable, real-world traffic estimate that could
be used to project the cost of alternative infrastructure. A high school
sophomore who turned in work like this would get an F....MORE